I mean, really, doesn't every team want their starting goalie to be a highly distinguished performer that plays a leading role for them? Yes, but the Canucks are the only ones that can ice a goalie of Italian heritage, thereby making the "diva" label highly appropriate.

Well, I guess, technically, Tony Gallagher should have called him a "divo", but whatever. I'll take it.

Ok, sure. Gallagher probably meant the term in a much more disparaging way, but then he should have used "prima donna" instead. I checked both Wikipedia and Dictionary.com, and the only definitions they had for "diva" were wholly positive. Maybe he mean, "prima donna," which while related, does have an officially negative definition. I would think somebody that makes a living out of stringing appropriate words together in a meaningful or entertaining way would choose his words carefully.

But I'll let that go. Clearly he meant it in a derogatory way. The question for me is why would Gallagher stoop so low as to call out Luongo at this particular time? Well, it turns out Gallagher has quite a few beefs with Luongo, but one stands out much more than the others:

Damn gingers. Always sticking together like some carrot-topped mafia.

Anyway, the Gallagher piece set off a mini firestorm last night, when it first went up as a blog post, but it really hit the fan this morning after making the back cover of the Province. Twitter was all, well, atwitter over it. Words were said. Accusations were made. Many straw dogs were burned to the ground.

Ground zero of this flame war was whether Luongo should share any of the blame for the predicament he and the team find themselves in, especially with respect whether or not he blocked any trade opportunities prior to the application of the cap recapture penalty as part of the new CBA. If you ask me, there's plenty of blame to go around:

You can all make up your own mind on whether Luongo blocked a potential trade or not, but there's enough out there to suggest he did, at least informally. Sure, he says he was never asked to waive his No Trade Clause at any time throughout this whole saga. I'll take him at his word for that. But in his interview with TSN's James Duthie, he pretty clearly suggested he actively discouraged any trades anywhere other than his preferred destination:

What happened was a couple… one or two days before last year's draft, Mike just told me that there was two or three teams were interested. He just said "interested", he never said "I have a trade for this team or this team" and all I said was "Mike, if you can, if you could do something with either Florida or Tampa, I would appreciate that, and if it doesn't work out we can move on."

With that as context, Gillis' hands were indeed tied, even if only briefly in the overall scheme of things. The problem is, it wasn't much longer after the 2012 draft that attention turned to re-signing free agents before a new CBA was in place, and the looming lockout.

So yeah, Luongo is stuck here, tied to a team he had mentally "divorced," as he so aptly put in that same TSN interview. But if you ask me, he was off slightly in use of the metaphor. Yes, this whole situation is indeed like a divorce. Only in this case, the mom got custody but the kid wants to go live with dad down in Florida instead. Problem is, dad is hooked up with a much younger Swede and doesn't really want the distraction.

Anyway, the "discussion" on Twitter quickly devolved into both sides assuming the other is arguing the most extreme version of their position possible, i.e. business as usual on the internets.

Soon after, however, the #TeamDiva hashtag made a brief appearance as a sarcastic show of support for Luongo as a result of the Gallagher hatchet job. But I really want to caution you Canucks' fans out there on taking this #TeamDiva thing too far. After all, "divas" is how they pronounce divers in Boston:

I'm not a hippie or on welfare.
I don't live in Kits, wear Birkenstocks or own an umbrella.
I've never been to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, but I'm sure it's very nice. I have a mayor, not a crack addict.
I drink pale ale, not Blue.
And I call it a cabin, not a cottage.
I can proudly say my team's been to the Stanley Cup Final in the last 45 years. They may not have won, but at least they got there.
I believe in sunshine, not haze; heat, not humidity. And that sushi is a healthy and tasty meal.
A coho is a fish. A ski hill is a mountain. And the plural of leaf is leaves. Okay? Not leafs. Leaves!
Vancouver is the country's third-largest city, certainly the most beautiful, and the best part of Canada!
My name is petbugs and I am a Canucks fan!
...
You can find me on Twitter @petbugs13 or send your hate mail to petbugs (at) gmail (dot) com but it better be funny or it's getting plonked.

Most of the local media are hacks anyway. Hell, more than half of them didn't want to see Vigneault gone. Even though it was obvious to many that his shelf life had ended.

Having the interview on TSN was a good solution for Lou. It was going to be a fair interview with Duthie. For those media types complaining, go back and read your articles and you will see why you didn't get it.

The media in Vancouver who report on the Canucks just have it in for this team, they are relentlessly negative, regardless of what is actually happening.

Here it is coming up on training camp, I and the other people who are real, actual Canuck fans are filled with anticipation and excitement for the upcoming season and all the interesting storylines like, how will the team deal with realignment? Will any of the terrific young prospects we've picked up the past couple seasons make the team? Kassian, Gaunce, Jensen, Shinkaruk, Horvat, Corrado, Lack...those are some good young players and I can't wait to see how they play in the preseason. What will Tortorella do? How about Kesler finally being healthy to start the season? Can Luongo find his regular form after the controversies of the past two seasons?

The last thing I want to read is this garbage from the usual suspects in the traitorous media. Between Macintyre somehow turning the news that the Sedins want to re-sign here into some kind of awful screed on how terrible the Canucks supposedly are, and Gallagher giving Luongo both barrels over his reaction/non-reaction to a controversy that was almost entirely media-driven to begin with...

I mean is there any conceivable thing Luongo could have done that would not have resulted in Gallagher writing this or a similar commentary? If he talks, the media hammers him. If he doesn't talk, they hammer him for that. You can't win with these fools in the press, I mean that in the sense that they are an impediment to the team.

I hope that Gillis and Torts call them out for what they really are, traitors and backstabbers who are rooting for the team to fail so that they can have some hot storylines. They stabbed the team and all us fans in the back during the Finals and they've been twisting the knife for two years now; I for one have had enough of it!

Another great piece by Graphic Comments! I look forward to these more than anything else on Canucksarmy. I remember petbugs from the old days of Usenet. He was funny then, and he's funny now!

On topic, I think the local media should be ashamed of themselves as they were driving the 'Luongo's no good' bus since he got the captaincy, feeding the flames for the fans to turn, causing the whole controversy to begin with.

I'm happy the Canucks kept Luongo - I just wish the Schneider trade had been made at the 2011 trade deadline. Through the whole two-goalie mess, I kept saying, "Remember when we had Pavel Bure, one of the best players in the league, and we ran him out of town? What's going to happen in five years if we move Luongo? We'll be reminiscing about the time we had a top-5 goalie and moved him for next to nothing, just because people thought we had a better goalie in CS.

The media in Vancouver who report on the Canucks just have it in for this team, they are relentlessly negative, regardless of what is actually happening.

Here it is coming up on training camp, I and the other people who are real, actual Canuck fans are filled with anticipation and excitement for the upcoming season and all the interesting storylines like, how will the team deal with realignment? Will any of the terrific young prospects we've picked up the past couple seasons make the team? Kassian, Gaunce, Jensen, Shinkaruk, Horvat, Corrado, Lack...those are some good young players and I can't wait to see how they play in the preseason. What will Tortorella do? How about Kesler finally being healthy to start the season? Can Luongo find his regular form after the controversies of the past two seasons?

The last thing I want to read is this garbage from the usual suspects in the traitorous media. Between Macintyre somehow turning the news that the Sedins want to re-sign here into some kind of awful screed on how terrible the Canucks supposedly are, and Gallagher giving Luongo both barrels over his reaction/non-reaction to a controversy that was almost entirely media-driven to begin with...

I mean is there any conceivable thing Luongo could have done that would not have resulted in Gallagher writing this or a similar commentary? If he talks, the media hammers him. If he doesn't talk, they hammer him for that. You can't win with these fools in the press, I mean that in the sense that they are an impediment to the team.

I hope that Gillis and Torts call them out for what they really are, traitors and backstabbers who are rooting for the team to fail so that they can have some hot storylines. They stabbed the team and all us fans in the back during the Finals and they've been twisting the knife for two years now; I for one have had enough of it!

Not at all. Enough damage had already been done by those spiteful GMs who made Lu's contract suddenly terrible during the lockout (and by having Schneids outplay him). The absolute least Lu could do for his own sake is just shut up and deflect questions rather than answering with something as damning as he did. Which is exactly what he did almost every other day during the controversy.

His candor is great and everything but playing poker when you've shown everyone your hand instantly makes you the loser. Negotiations are no different. You keep the cards tight to your chest until it's all said and done.